Tsumaranai!

“hang the lying wolf…”

 

Summary: -There’s a game going around Japan called ‘Rabbit Doubt’. The premise of the game is that all of the players are rabbits in a colony, and one amongst them is randomly chosen to be a wolf that infiltrated the group of rabbits. Every round, the wolf kills off a rabbit, and every round, the group tries to figure out which of the rabbits is actually a wolf in disguise. Sometimes the kids who play this game decide to meet up in person, and Yuu, Mitsuki, Rei, Hajime, Eiji, and Haruka have done just that. Unfortunately, one of them has decided to take on the mantle of the wolf and has already killed once. Who is the wolf, and can they be stopped before everyone meets a very unpleasant end?

Review:

-Doubt was cool for the first thirteen or so chapters you could feel the tension build up, then it got what I call the ‘Geass’ issue; the story was too complicated to end neatly, so the author panicked and tried to wrap up the ending using whatever pieces he had left to play with. In Geass’s case, they even bent the rule about not reviving dead people, not once but a ton of times. In Doubt, the author forgot, or deliberately ignored, several key points and impossibilities, turning a Wolf into something of a teleporting, I-know-what-you-did-last-summer being, or into a sort of god-being who can warp reality.

-In short, it was a fun ride at the start, but if you want endings to make sense, better not pick up this series because the impossibilities will irritate you to death. Personally I wouldn’t have continued past the point where I could tell who the Wolf was (which, unfortunately, was pretty early on… it  was rather obvious) but I really liked the chapter opener pages, so I kept going till the end. The rest of the comic  is fairly well drawn but rather generic looking; the style isn’t unique like Miwa Shirow’s or CLAMP’s.

TLDR

Good points:

• opener pages are awesome, really goad you into reading the chapter itself
• using a bunny theme for the game is genius. They’re so cute and so disturbing. 8D
• chapter titles are short and sweet. They don’t give much away, just enough to make you curious.
• tension kept building for the first dozen chapters or so.

Bad points:

• ending sucked. And FYI  I don’t hate all trainwreck endings. It’s just the freaking flaws that tick me off.
• around 3/4 of the series, the author suddenly jumps reality and starts making paranormally superpowered kids.
• if the Wolf was really that powerful, why bother with a child’s game and simply make everyone kill themselves?